Ever since I became conscious of my own mortality, I have been making a list of must-read books in my head. You know stuff like that: various Russians meditating on free will and religion, something by the Brontë sisters, maybe Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire if I manage to retire. Maybe. And yes, Austin, obviously Austin. This is the author my mother always encouraged me to read when she still talked to me every week, and after she passed away, I was unable to read it for a shameful decade or so.
Lately, I’ve been struggling with the decline of social media just like everyone else. With a long enough timeline, almost all platforms will progress in the same way. Quickly manipulate the slider to increase engagement, a few bad actors do a little bot farming, and everything falls apart on its own. I don’t know exactly how many hours I’ve spent carefully crafting replies to obvious trolls or worrying about life because I’m being force-fed by the worst people in the world’s opinion But it’s clearly too much. Worse, nothing seemed to keep me away completely. I could set time limits for myself, install blockers, delete accounts, etc., but somehow I found myself sneaking back and spending the last 20 minutes of each night despairing about the state of the world. I was spending time.
Eventually, I had an idea. In nutrition circles, there’s a strategy called “crowding out” of your diet. It’s about adding more and more healthy foods until there’s no room for junk anymore. If you eat four eggs for breakfast and an apple before 11 o’clock, you won’t think about eating custard cream in the morning. I decided to do the same with books. If you decide to read 2-3 hours a day, you’ll eliminate the time you spend online angering, blaming, and doom scrolling. I would eliminate the tweetstorms, embrace the literary giants, and everything would be fine.
Dear reader, it wasn’t that easy.
The peculiarity of apples is that, although they may not be as rich as biscuits, they are still much easier to digest than Dostoevsky. Of course, there are little tricks you can use to help yourself read books. The best way I’ve found is to make books more accessible than screens, including stacking reading material on every horizontal surface in your home. Put a book in your bag or hide your phone in a drawer. But ultimately, in order to read more books, at some point you have to actually sit down and read a book, where all your carefully curated advice falls apart.
In an episode of Peep Show, there’s a scene in which Jez, a reckless TV lover, tries to read Wuthering Heights within a day in order to impress a potential lover. His flatmate Mark assesses the situation perfectly with his vulture eyes. Don’t look away. ”
The first book I worked on was Emma. I had to force myself to read the first two chapters.
As I grappled with the Western canon, it felt like this argument was repeating itself endlessly in my scroll-addicted brain, with my prefrontal cortex at war with my gratification-seeking limbic system. I’ve always been a big reader, but there’s a difference between flipping through the latest pop science blockbuster and understanding the greats of the 19th century.
Austin was my Everest and the struggle was really uphill. After years of reading the staccato sentences of would-be Linked influencers, diving into endless semicolons and subordinate clauses feels like eating a whole cauliflower from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. I know which one is better for me, but I’m biting into it too much. 1 time. The first book I tackled was Emma, and I had to force myself through the first two chapters. Character names, relationships, and parenthetical asides were written on each page, with no bullet point summary in sight.
But soon after that, something clicked. Around the same time I figured out who all the characters were, my brain got used to the rhythm of dense text (watching “Clueless” a few times helped) and suddenly I I am…enjoying Austin. The chapter openings are consistently great, the asides are brutal, and the social criticisms are delivered in rapid succession. There’s a scene where a character goes to London to get a haircut and everyone else is so brazenly mean about it that I laughed out loud in a cafe.
Then it was off to the races. I start reading a book every night, tucking myself under the blankets on the couch and plowing through as many pages as I can before the embrace of nature’s gentle nurse (Shakespeare’s words, not mine) catches up with me. I did. Eventually, I put my laptop and cell phone upstairs, far from where I would want to pick them up, and started going straight from one classic item to the next. Almost everything turned out to be as good as I heard. It’s not a boring task to read, it’s full of great ideas and beautiful expressions. I’m sorry to everyone I’ve ever talked to about literature, and also to my mother.
And it worked, dear reader. These days, when a friend tells me about the latest X-beef or infuriating pile-on on WhatsApp, about 70% of the time I don’t understand what they’re saying. The anxiety you get after 10pm is not about the collapse of democracy or microplastics in your water bottle, but about the injustices of Victorian class systems (thank you, Wilkie Collins). I still find times during the rest of the day to get annoyed by things like that – I’m only human – but in the blissful hours or so before bed, I find myself living more than 100 years ago. Immerse yourself completely in the person’s concerns.
Of course, I haven’t read a single Russian book yet. I’ll save it until my PlayStation breaks.
